CHAPTER V

Though early hours--except in the topsy-turvy sense of seeing the sunrise overnight--had never entered into the scheme of Miss Ransome’s existence, and she was as little indebted to the lamb as to the lark for an example, yet never had clock uttered a more welcome sound than that single stroke of half-past ten, which made Mrs. Tancred, as if by machinery, fold up her large seam, restore it to its basket, and rise from her chair. The clocks at Stillington struck all together, for all were true to Greenwich as the needle to the pole.

“You are probably tired,” said the hostess; and the guest was reduced to such a jelly-like state of tremor and self-distrust that she did not know whether to acquiesce in or disclaim the accusation. If she admitted fatigue, Camilla would probably despise her; if she denied, it would very likely--judging by her past experience of husbands and wives--be looked upon as a manœuvre for procuring a _tête-à-tête_ with Edward in the smoking-room. So she answered, with deferential hesitation--

“Just pleasantly; nothing to speak of. Thank you so much.”

“Thank me for what? For telling you that you are tired?”

It was a discomfiting way of taking a little meaningless courtesy, but at least it ended in landing Bonnybell in the blessed security of her own bedroom. For, except that there was nothing to speak of in the way of eatables and drinkables provided for the night--Mrs. Tancred being of the antediluvian race who suppose that people after an admirable eight-o’clock dinner do not need cold cutlets or quails to sustain them till morning--she found herself extremely, roomily comfortable; and having got into a dressing-gown, with more lace and openwork about it than Camilla would think quite moral, threw herself into an admirably stuffed armchair, to take stock of her own blunders, and ask herself whether they were quite irreparable.

“Oh, what would I give for a cigarette! but I suppose that that would about finish me. However many miles off her rooms may be, she would be certain to smell it, and it is too cold to smoke out of the window.”

Her thoughts went back regretfully to the many little pleasant evening smokes in old Tom’s den in Hill Street, when Felicity was safely away at some committee meeting. “It shall be as you wish. God bless you, dear!” She laughed out loud again, as she had done in the train.

Then her reflections took a graver turn. If it were possible to avoid it, she must not be turned out of Stillington, as she had been--however poor, good-natured old Felicity might try to gloss it over--turned out of Hill Street. To avoid this undesirable result, one of the first and most urgent postulates was to ascertain, with the least possible delay, what topics of conversation were permissible and what tabooed in this extraordinary atmosphere of Puritanism and prudery. If she could make a friend of Edward, and quietly put her case before him? She dismissed the suggestion with a shrug. “If you try to make a friend of a man, he tries to kiss you!” This was a syllogism whose accuracy she had never had any reason to doubt. Valuable as enlightenment from a person who had had fifteen years’ intimate experience of Camilla would be, it was therefore wiser to abstain from seeking it, and to work out the problem by one’s own individual lights.

With elbows propped on the old chintz-covered arms of her chair, and eyes exploring the fiery caves of a grate as generously roomy as that chair, Miss Ransome made pass in carefully scanned procession before her mind’s eye the topics likely to present themselves on the morrow, sifting and winnowing the few thoroughly sound ones from among the wilderness of subjects likely, apparently, if treated with the ease and freedom which came natural to her, to lead to her speedy expulsion. “Felicity and Tom? H’m! doubtful. Felicity safe enough; but Tom?”

A process of elimination, conducted with a strictness of which this first beginning was an example, ended by leaving only three themes upon which the seal of complete security could be set--the weather, the contents of the newspapers, with the exception of the Divorce Court, and Jock. Even in his case a rider had to be added, that under no circumstances was he to lead up to reminiscences of Mimi. But of the innumerable multitude of the tabooed, a trio were four-lined and three-starred. ‘Claire,’ her own past: especially anything referring to her education, and the _demi-monde en bloc_.

Having completed, at a late hour of the night, these dispositions for her future guidance, she betook herself to a high, wide, and admirable bed, while still sighing for a cigarette, and vainly hunting for sandwiches and whisky and soda.

* * * * *

If Bonnybell’s conversational infelicities had disquieted herself, they had produced a certainly not inferior effect upon one at least--and the most important--of her two auditors. It was not often that Camilla reappeared after retiring for the night, but the occasion was one worthy of the exceptional, and Edward was not much surprised by her advent in the smoking-room shortly after he had assumed his smoking-jacket, and established himself in his accustomed surroundings, to face a problem almost as difficult as that which was engaging Miss Ransome’s attention upstairs. He had rather that his wife had not broken through her usual habits, having a dim feeling that he was not ready to cope with her, and a less dim impression that her _déshabillé_ was unnecessarily unbecoming.

Camilla was not one of the women who are coquettish with their husbands, nor did she use any of the little pardonable juggles often indulged in by women who have wedded men greatly their juniors. Rather did she seem determined to underline and dash the fifteen all too obvious years that parted her from Edward. In the early days of their married life he had been wont gently to remonstrate, but it was now long since the hair, ruthlessly torn back from the already too high and bare forehead, and the tasteless, laceless woollen wrapper, had found and left him anything but silent and acquiescent.

To-night, the forehead seemed more naked and the _peignoir_ woollier and drabber than usual. Mrs. Tancred did not sit down. Evidently no ease of posture could beseem such a crisis.

“What have we done? or rather what has Felicity done for us?”

He had risen, with habitual politeness, at her entrance.

“Is she worse than you expected?”

“I suppose that I am not imaginative. I wait for my eye and ear to inform me, before I realize things.”

“Your _eye_?” His judgment disapproved the protest, but the impress of Bonnybell’s beauty upon his brain was too strong and recent for him to be able to help it.

“Oh, I grant you that she is extraordinarily pretty!”--with a reluctant note of pleasure in the fact admitted--“prettier than a person has any business to be!” stamping relentlessly upon that weakness of hers for physical beauty which her husband had always felt to be pathetic. “But _what_ a girl!”

“_Fin de siècle?_” he asked, snatching at a phrase which in 1901 had lost its significance, but which he hoped expressed enough disapprobation to meet the requirements of the case.

“I never could see why the end of a century should justify immorality more than the beginning; but _what_ a girl! what a plane of thought she moves on! what a moral standpoint!”

The man expressed no dissent. He could not conscientiously take up the cudgels in defence of Miss Ransome’s system of ethics, and to say anything in palliation of it would do her only disservice.

“_What_ a girl! what a _milieu_! Sir Algernon Skipton! and Mademoiselle Lolotte!--unnamable men and unfortunates!”

This last well seasoned sentence did elicit an “Oh!” but it was as involuntary as the sneeze produced by an over-mustarded _devil_.

“Well, what else can you call Mademoiselle Lolotte, when she is translated into plain English?”

Edward did not call Mademoiselle Lolotte anything else, though a secret flash of amusement crossed his mind at the application of the homely word to the magnificent monarch of the Parisian Half World, as he had last seen her whizzing past in her motor brougham to Longchamps.

“You must remember that she has not had much chance,” he said, making his plea with temperate carefulness.

“Who? Mademoiselle Lolotte or Mademoiselle Bonnybell?”

The juxtaposition of the two names made him unaccountably angry; but the habit of self-government was strong, and did not now fail him.

“I meant Miss Ransome.”

Something, however smothered, of what he was feeling must have pierced through his tone, or else her own inward monitor rebuked her, for Camilla rejoined in quite a different key--

“That is true, and you are right to remind me of it; but”--with a relapse into consternation--“_What_ a girl! She speaks of her dead mother by her Christian name as Claire!”

“You can easily break her of that.”

“She was turned out of a boarding-school in Paris!”

“She told you so?”

“Yes, in answer to a question of mine about her education.”

“For misconduct?”

“H’m! She said that the mistress of the establishment thought that some other system would suit her better. It sounds like a lie, and a bad lie, but she looked as if she were speaking truth; indeed, I am almost sure that she was.”

A memory of the air of perfect veracity with which Miss Ransome had dilated to himself upon Felicity’s immense admiration for his wife’s form of philanthropy--an admiration of whose non-existence she must have been as well aware as himself--made it difficult to Edward to endorse Camilla’s conviction; but he kept his difficulty, as he kept most things, to himself.

“If she speaks truth,” continued his wife, holding on apparently with desperation to the one rope thrown her by this possibility, “whatever awful facts she may tell us about herself--and, poor wretch, I suppose that she has not any others to tell--there will be hope for her, for us; there will be some basis to go upon; we shall know where we are.”

“And even if she does not?”

The supposition expressed was drawn from him involuntarily, and no sooner uttered than regretted.

“Have you any reason for supposing that she does not?”

His rejoinder was as disingenuous as his _protégée’s_ would undoubtedly have been.

“I! Already! How is that possible?” His disclaimer was so completely successful that he felt compunction, and yet not so strongly as to regret having put his sleuth-hound off the scent.

“What were you going to say when I interrupted you?”

“Oh, nothing of any importance. I was only going to suggest that whatever shortcomings you may discover in this poor little creature--and I dare say there will be plenty of them” (he despised himself for the concession, which he knew to be a bid for his wife’s leniency)--“we must remember her antecedents; we must try to make allowances for her.”

She stood for a moment silent before him, her unbeautiful arms folded in her dull wrapper.

“Yes,” she answered dryly, yet assentingly. “Make allowances! It is a manufacture that for fifty years I have found phenomenally difficult; but you are right! one has no business to look for morals and manners in the Stews!”

He was used to the crudity of her phrases; yet now he turned with a quick movement towards the fire to hide the shudder that her old-fashioned vernacular, used in its present connection, caused him; but the accurate lyre-shaped clock on the chimney-piece above his head had ticked ten times before he could face his companion again with a controlled smile.

“And there is one thing, at all events, indisputably in her favour.”

“What?”

“Jock has taken a fancy to her.”